ABSTRACT
This South Slavonic language is spoken by about 18 million people, and has been present in the Balkans since the sixth/seventh centuries. Since the Middle Ages the area has been divided on two planes - socio-linguistically between Orthodox (Serbia) and Catholic (Croatia), with a Moslem component in the south; and dialectally between Stokavian (east, centre, and south-west), Kajkavian (north) and Cakavian (west). These names are derived from the words for the interrogative pronoun ‘what?’, which are respectively sto, kaj, and ca. In the early nineteenth century Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic chose Stokavian as the basis for the reformed Serbian literary standard, at the same time as Ljudevit Gaj was engaged on a similar project for Croat. In 1850 a Literary Accord was signed in Vienna, recognizing Stokavian as the basis for the new unified language, Serbo-Croat. Not that this accord put an end to dialectal variation; on the contrary, new Stokavian itself falls into three mutually intelligible dialect forms: Ekavian (in Serbia), Ijekavian (western Serbia and Croatia) and Ikavian (Dalmatia and parts of Bosnia). The latter is no longer used as a literary language, but the other two, centring respectively on Belgrade and Zagreb, are about equally distributed and used interchangeably. They differ on some morphological points (see below) and, most noticeably, in the pronunciation of the mid front vowel e\ e.g. Belgrade sneg ‘snow’ = Zagreb snijeg; reka ‘river’ = rijeka ; lep ‘beautiful’ = lijep.
